Ableton Forum

I recorded two songs last night and when I open the sets they are playing at a higher pitch. I finished one song and bounced it. I opened a separate set, recorded another song just fine and bounced it as well. When I went to listen to the bounces, they sounded like some Alvin and the Chipmunk crap, playing at a higher pitch. When I go to reopen the sessions, they are sounding like this now and I changed absolutely no settings the entire night. Ableton is always set to 48K 24Bit. My Apollo console is set to 48K always as well. I played around with different combinations of sample rates on Console & Ableton. Closing and reopening the application every time. I tried not using my interface and just using the regular iMac sound card on different sample rates and it’s the same. Is my audio completely ruined now? I spent hours recording it just fine, I don’t understand and this is so frustrating. Does anyone have any ideas?

Are you opening the sets as an audio file? If so, make sure that warp mode is turned off - that thing trips people up all the time.

So I checked my raw files folder in Finder. Project > Samples > Recorded. All the raw files are pitched up. How in the world did my recorded samples get rewritten like that?

Can you check the sample rate of the raw files?

properLofi wrote: ↑

Tue May 04, 2021 8:30 am

Can you check the sample rate of the raw files?

All the raw vocal sample files are 48K 24. The beat was the only thing that was 44.1K. I've recorded hundreds of sessions with the beat MP3 being 44.1K in a session that is set to 48K 24 Bit.

check the master channel. might have something on there

I e only encountered this issue before when the system sample rate and the file sample rate don’t match. It sounds like this is somehow the issue but I can’t see why Ableton would change behaviours if you haven’t asked it to.

properLofi wrote: ↑

Thu May 06, 2021 6:09 pm

I e only encountered this issue before when the system sample rate and the file sample rate don’t match. It sounds like this is somehow the issue but I can’t see why Ableton would change behaviours if you haven’t asked it to.

The only thing I think I can do to save my client's audio is to run the beat through by itself and bounce it in 48K, and transpose the vocals down incrementally with transpose and detune. This is some black magic voodoo that has befallen me. It did it to two different sessions that night.

It might be if the length of the clip is other than 1/2/4/8/16/etc bars, some odd number such as 7 results in the the clip being stretched or song tempo changed.

Not sure if this relates to this issue and have never found the time to investigate this problem but it keep repeating very few months, even if looper, i.e. onboard tool was used for recording.

All I know is that Ableton rewrote my raw recorded files. To my knowledge, this is an irreversible error. Some evil voodoo. The only thing I can think of for why Ableton did this to two separate project files that fateful night, is that I was multitasking with Ozone 9, opened separately. Idk if having two programs with different sample rates running had anything to do with it, but I don't open them simultaneously anymore.

Bingo! If your interface was being used for both apps I can see that causing issues if the two applications are set to different sample rates. I’d normally expect some sort of warning somewhere but can see it either being missed or either/both programs failing to identify the issue.

I wonder if you could replicate the scenario to get correct playback and render out the audio to new files somehow.